


Wrap me up in Dreams and Death

by CanvasConstellations



Series: Wrap my heart in a nest of stars [3]
Category: Lunar Chronicles - Marissa Meyer
Genre: F/M, vampire!AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-09 23:44:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4368920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CanvasConstellations/pseuds/CanvasConstellations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He dreams of funny things, of lace and ribbons, and video games. He dreams of nothing sometimes. He dreams of wide blue eyes and pale fingers tugging at his sleeves. For a whole decade he chases after honey blonde hair, and pretty singing voices.<br/>(It’s never her.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wrap me up in Dreams and Death

**Author's Note:**

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> **Prompt(s): Hunger, Innocence**

She lies dreaming of home and sunlight when he stumbles into the ruins of the second era opera house she’s claimed as hers. Crescent wakes to the smell of blood and the shuffle of unsteady footsteps. 

Her first instinct is to hide, her second is to _bite_. He’s beautiful, the noisy, brown-haired, blue-eyed thing. She lingers behind the soft curtains and aches to run her fingers through his hair, down his jaw. She dreams of pressing a kiss there and squeaks. 

(She hasn’t fed in a week and her teeth hurt.) 

He hears her near-silent sound and reaches for his gun. The bullets aren’t silver, she can tell but she scrambles back further into a corner and wraps herself in shadows. She can easily disarm him, pull him down and nick a taste of that rich, thick blood she can smell on him, drink deep and long until his heart is but a flutter and his skin is less than warm. 

But what she wants to do is ask him how he got hurt so bad. She wants to wrap him in bandages and clutch at the warmth of him, warmth that has eluded her for many, many years. She bites her lip and counts the years it’s been since she has been around a person, a living, breathing _person_ , for any longer than it takes for her to snap their neck. About a century. Almost as long as she’s been dead. 

The air carries a tang of his fear in it. He moves slowly, haltingly, eying all the dark corners with distrust. The hand that isn’t clutching his sad little weapon is holding the torn skin and tissue at the side of his stomach. His breathing is so loud, it drowns the whisper of her feet as she dances away to find a med kit. 

(She’s kept one for the birds and the kittens. All the stray things she should be biting into.) 

His eyes widen when he sees her. His feet stumble on the debris littering the broken stone floor. She hopes he doesn’t notice the spot of blood on her dress. At least she’s combed and painstakingly braided her hair earlier in the day, twining a pretty piece of crimson ribbon she found in one of the forgotten wreaks of a dressing room. She shifts from one foot to the other and after several long seconds moves cautiously, slowly towards him, step by visible step. 

He looks like he wants to run. His fingers tighten around the gun but he doesn’t raise it towards her. Something inside him recognises the predator in her; through she doesn’t look the part. Yet he lets her approach, lets her grasp the ends of his sleeve and pull him gently towards the crumbling staircase. 

He watches her with keen, curious eyes as she cleans and binds his cuts and bruises, and that ugly gash at his side. He winces at the sting of the antiseptic. She flinches at the thought of hurting him. (He’s _very_ pretty.) He studies her still as she gathers up the bandages and gauge and returns them all to her med kit. He looks like he wants to say something, and she expects him to ask about her red rimmed eyes or her too pale, too cold skin. 

He leans in close, she recoils back. He grins, lopsided and wicked, and whistles, low and long. 

“That is a _lot_ of hair,” he tells her.  
  
  
  
  


Crescent doesn’t think he’d come back. But then again, strays often do. He looks better this time around. There’s a delicious colour to his cheeks, and no limp in his gait. His hair looks so fluffy, so soft that she almost buries her fingers in it before she withdraws and shuffles back hurriedly. 

He looks amused but makes no comment. He brings gifts instead: a bag of blood and a blue-green dress of chiffon and lace. “You’ve got a little...” he gestures at the stain by her collar. 

She thanks him in a quiet voice and he grins at her crookedly. “So,” he says, “how about introductions?”  
  
  
  
  


He comes back again and again, and she wants to ask him why, but she’s afraid that he’ll stop if she makes him realise that his behaviour is strange. She’s dangerous. The blood on her clothes didn’t come from any rats or ally cats. She dreams all too often of licking her way down his neck and sinking her teeth into his veins. 

He asks her about the turning one afternoon. Some days she can’t sleep, and she only needs to send him a comm and he’s there, as if he has nothing better to do. She understands that he’s something of a thief (he prefers 'criminal mastermind') and his scrapes from the time they’d first met were from a particularly hazardous venture that leaned towards the illegal. She thinks about the first time she’d killed someone. She can no longer remember a face, or even the first taste. She only remembers the crippling horror afterwards, and how she had run so far, so fast that it had taken her sire a week to find her. 

She finds herself reaching towards him involuntarily but he’s bathed in sunlight, golden, precious, and out of reach. He catches the movement, and smiles. His fingers seek her out and wrap around her hand. (If she tugs at him a little too hard, she could pull him into the shadows with her.) 

She doesn’t answer is queries. The turning is not something she likes to think about. She can barely remember a time when she wasn’t just teeth and bones and hunger. She closes her eyes and counts his heartbeats instead.  
  
  
  
  


It took her a long time to be able to break away from Mistress Sybil, but for the last decade, she’s been free. Half-starved and confined to a shabby opera house, yes, but free. And for that decade, she hasn’t killed anyone. Not yet. She’s slipped in and out of blood banks whenever she can (eluding security systems is a speciality of hers), or had a taste, a little sip from here and there (erasing and altering memories are as easy as wiping a security camera feed). 

She takes a bite of a cat once. It struggles, and scratches, and breaks free before she can have her fill. And it never comes back to the opera house. Other animals do though. Pretty birds, and wounded pups. Hungry kittens, a one eyed mouse, and one Captain Carswell Thorne.  
  
  
  
  


He traces circular patterns on her back, like letters, or words, or stories. His head rests on her shoulder, and Crescent can hardly believe the amount of trust he’s placed in her. (She can break him, if she wants.) 

She hums a lullaby as she fiddles with his portscreen, going about setting new high scores in all his video games. She doesn’t even notice that he’s fallen asleep.  
  
  
  
  


He kisses her cheek when he leaves. She squeaks, and the brush of his heat haunts her for days.  
  
  
  
  


She doesn’t understand _why_ when he doesn’t come back. She’s commed him twice. She comms him again. But night shifts into day, and day shifts back into night, again, and again, and there is still no sign of him. 

She had never thought that heartbreak could hurt more than death ever did.  
  
  
  
  


A month. That’s how long he’s gone. 

He returns with shadows under his eyes, and she can smell blood on him. The first thing he does when he sees her is hug her. She freezes because she’s never been hugged before. Never ever. His warmth envelops her and she can only hold still for eight whole seconds before she bursts into tears. 

He whispers apologies long after she has stopped crying.  
  
  
  
  


_Happy_ , is not something she remembers ever being. Somewhere at the back of her mind she knows that Mistress Sybil will find her. She always does. 

He tells her he’ll whisk her away in his spaceship (just as soon as he figures out how to fly it).  
  
  
  
  


He never gets to.  
  
  
  
  


There’s a knife to his throat and she’s forgotten how to breathe. She’s never been in a fight. Not against her own kind. Running is all she knows, all she’s ever been good at. She’s too short, too slow, too _weak._

And he’s about to die because of that. 

Mistress laughs, a soft, lilting sound. She drags the tip of the blade down the curve of the Captain’s throat, and presses down against a vein. She likes clean cuts that do not make a mess of her finely pressed suit jackets. She likes the cold tips of steel instead of teeth and claws. Crescent is sure that one of these days, Mistress will start using a straw to avoid splatter. 

She’s so caught up in her fears that Crescent doesn’t catch Thorne’s movements. Mistress Sybil, busy in her gloating doesn’t see the poorly carved stake. He turns around fast, faster than Crescent would have expected him to be able to, and slams his make-shift weapon past Sybil’s ribs, just a breath away from her heart. He shoves the stake in deeper, using both hands, and every ounce of strength in him. 

“Run!” Thorne yells. “Crescent, run!” 

She wants to. She wants to. It’s all she knows how to do. But she picks up the knife Mistress dropped. 

And she fights.  
  
  
  
  


They’re surrounded—six of the Mistress’ sired against the two of them. 

“This looks very dire,” Thorne comments drily. 

Crescent whimpers. She’d wanted to die, once, in the first few years after the turning. She wants to live now. But the Universe has other plans.  
  
  
  
  


She tastes ashes in her mouth, and blood in the air. His hand fumbles around for her until his fingertips brush against hers. Dying is a slow and painful process, even for the undead. She wishes she could just turn to dust instead. The stake burns hot against her heart. 

He turns his head towards her and smiles. There’s blood at the corner of his mouth. She never even got to kiss him. 

“Not bad, I’d say,” he tries to gesture at the six unmoving bodies around them. She tries to smile back. The knife is still in her hand. She watches him struggle for each breath. There’s still an hour till sunrise. He stops breathing after ten minutes. 

She does not cry. She holds on to the knife, counting the seconds, and counting her laboured breaths, hoping that he’ll forgive her someday, perhaps in a century or so.  
  
  
  
  


He starts breathing again, twelve seconds after she’s stopped.  
  
  
  
  


He dreams of a ruined opera house and moonlight. He wakes up to the taste of blood in his mouth and the burn of sunlight in his skin. He screams. There are eight burnt shapes in the concrete, and he can’t find Crescent anywhere.  
  
  
  
  


He gets used to it after a while, being dead but not. He likes the speed, the strength, and even the taste of blood isn’t half as bad as he thought. Especially O positive. Yum. The mild mind control powers are also extremely cool. And his hair has never looked better. He even has friends now. A cyborg, a somewhat unstable android, a werewolf and a trigger-happy hunter. 

He misses a lot of things though. Like sunlight and solid food (especially ice cream) and body heat. He misses having a heartbeat. He misses having a reflection. 

He misses _her._  
  
  
  
  


He dreams of funny things, of lace and ribbons, and video games. He dreams of nothing sometimes. He dreams of wide blue eyes and pale fingers tugging at his sleeves. For a whole decade he chases after honey blonde hair, and pretty singing voices. 

It’s never her. 

It’s _never_ her. 

He’s only chasing after a ghost. 

In L.A. he finds someone like her. Kate Fallow has pretty, warm brown eyes. Clever, endearing Kate Fallow who bites her lip and blushes when he looks at her a certain way. 

He feels so ridiculously guilty when he kisses her that he disappears that very night. Cinder finds him holed up all the way in Africa a month later and rolls her eyes so violently, he’s surprised they don’t fall out.  
  
  
  
  


Scarlet keeps trying to set him up. 

They’re all pretty, bright, _wonderful_ girls. But he keeps finding himself looking for a blond head in crowds, and empty opera houses. 

He has to keep himself from chasing after every glimpse of her.  
  
  
  
  


“Tell me about her,” Scarlet asks one night as she nibbles at a slice of strawberry cake. They sit in a quaint little cafe Scarlet found in Paris during one of her hunts. She likes to drag him here as often as she’s able. To “taste the air”, she says. The only thing he wants a taste of is a nice throbbing vein, which, unfortunately isn’t listed on the menu. 

“She was cuter than you,” Thorne offers. 

“And?” 

He thinks about it. “Short. _Really_ short.” 

He spots a flash of yellow from the corner of his eyes, and on instinct his gaze follows. “About her height,” he nods towards the girl. Her hair is the same shade has Crescent’s had been too, thought not nearly as long. Hers is cut to chin length. Her back is turned to them, and he wonders if her eyes are the right shape and size too. 

He wants to go up to her and say hello, but he remains in his seat, counting his breaths, and her heartbeats. 

Heartbeats. 

She’s not Crescent. In a moment she’ll turn and disappoint him. He waits for it.  
  
  
  
  


She turns. 

He forgets how to breathe.


End file.
